


oh so

by hatsuna



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: M/M, Trichotillomania
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 05:08:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26966440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hatsuna/pseuds/hatsuna
Summary: “Uhm, Ki?”It’s August, and the shrill of cicadas nearly drowns out the careful undulation of Motoya’s voice. They’re fourteen.“What?”“Why, why does your eyebrow look like that?”
Relationships: Miya Atsumu/Sakusa Kiyoomi
Comments: 44
Kudos: 544
Collections: ~SakuAtsu~





	oh so

**Author's Note:**

> cw / trichotillomania (pulling out hair), blood mention, food mention

“Uhm, Ki?”

It’s August, and the shrill of cicadas nearly drowns out the careful undulation of Motoya’s voice. They’re fourteen. 

“What?”

“Why, why does your eyebrow look like that?”

It is only now that the panic in Motoya’s voice manages to worm through Kiyoomi’s focus. He tears his gaze away from the blue and gold stinging his forearms and looks up at his cousin. 

Motoya is no longer bumping his ball in tandem. Instead, he’s clutching it like it’s a lifeline, and he’s biting his lip like he’s trying not to cry. 

“Why does my eyebrow look like what?” Kiyoomi didn’t scrutinize his reflection in the fogged bathroom mirror this morning. Right now, his face feels fine—light, even. 

“I mean, well, part of it’s gone.” Motoya speaks like Kiyoomi’s missing a limb. “How did that happen?”

Kiyoomi considers this. “I picked at it last night, I guess.” The words are familiar in his head but foreign when they’re out in the air. 

“Oh.”

Motoya has always been the bigger baby of the two. Everything makes him emotional: a clock two minutes behind, laundry left out in the rain, growing out of a pair of shoes. 

His tear-streaked cheeks still tie Kiyoomi’s stomach in knots.

  
  
  
  


The desire to pick at his eyebrows only grows. It sizzles like electricity beneath his fingertips. It burns his insides. 

Trichotillomania, maybe. Unhealthy stress relief, maybe. Something else, maybe. It doesn’t need a title to be real. By high school, it can rightfully be called a compulsion. By college, it’s a part of life. He gets so fixated on it that he can’t bother to study or eat or sleep until he feels like he’s done picking. But hair grows back. He’s never really done. 

Kiyoomi does not try to untangle the implications of this. He orders an ebony brow pencil, and he doesn’t look back. 

  
  
  
  


Miya Atsumu is the first person outside of Kiyoomi’s family to point out his brows. They’re twenty-two. 

It's five am. Kiyoomi is up because he never went to sleep. Atsumu is up because he is obnoxious, and he runs, and he likes to go on obnoxious morning runs. 

They run into one another in the hallway—quite literally. Kiyoomi is counting the number of swirls on the browning carpet as he pads out of the kitchen with a mug of tea. Atsumu is humming with his eyes closed. They’re in separate universes, to say the least. When Kiyoomi’s forehead collides with the bulk of Atsumu’s shoulder, they’re pulled back down to the same, shitty earth. 

“Holy shit, Omi-kun, are ya okay?” Atsumu is struggling to take out his wireless earbuds with clammy hands.

Kiyoomi responds with an elegant “Ow,” and then, “Watch where you’re going, dumbass.”

He anticipates a biting comment in return, but it doesn’t come. No response comes at all.

There’s something wrong with Atsumu’s face. His forehead is glistening with sweat, of course, but it kind of looks like he’s passing through all five stages of grief and doing calculus at the same time. After twenty seconds of deafening silence, he blurts, “Why does yer eyebrow look like that?”

It does not matter that daylight has barely crept out of her slumber: Miya Atsumu is still shameless. 

Bare-faced, Kiyoomi answers, “I haven’t filled it in yet.” He scratches at his brow. 

“Where the hell did the other half of it go?” 

“I picked at it."

There is no believable excuse as to why he has a bald spot in his left eyebrow. It’s a shame, really, that he has to be honest, because if anyone were to have a ball over this, it’d be Atsumu. Atsumu likes feeling superior. He likes having the best sets, and the best interviews, and the best Instagram feed, and he probably likes having the best eyebrows, too. Douchebag.

But all Atsumu responds with is, “Why?”

“Why what?” 

“Why do ya pick at yer eyebrow?”

Why?

Why does the sun rise in the east and set in the west? Why do the leaves rust amber in fall? Why is a nine by eighteen-meter rectangle such solace? 

“Because it feels good to,” Kiyoomi offers, and the corners of his mouth are turning down without his permission. “Or maybe it feels bad not to.” He’s wrings his hands. 

“You okay? Ya look a little freaked.” There’s something new on Atsumu’s face now. Concern, maybe, if you squint right. 

“I’m fine. It’s just—“ Kiyoomi’s frown deepens. “No one’s ever asked me why before.”

  
  
  
  


They overlap often, really. On the walks home from practice. During early morning collisions. During bleeding evenings when the rest of the building is snoozing. 

On one particularly surreal night, Kiyoomi finds Atsumu alone on the roof-top terrace. This spot is rarely occupied, and it’s one that Kiyoomi has declared his own for the past year. 

Atsumu is leaning as far over the railing as he can, like he almost wishes it weren’t there, like he’s seventeen and fearless, like Osaka is too much and not enough all at once. His t-shirt is too big. It’s November. 

Kiyoomi watches for a moment, dumbstruck. Then he stations himself a meter down from Atsumu and brings two fingers up to his left brow.

“You should probably stop picking’ at yer eyebrow.” 

Atsumu is clenching and unclenching his hands around the railing. 

_You’re leaning too far over the edge to do that,_ Kiyoomi thinks. He tells Atsumu, “I know.”

“I know ya know. Still gonna tell ya though.”

Kiyoomi looks out at the city. It’s pretty at night—glowing, almost. “It won’t change anything.”

Atsumu nods. “Doesn’t need to.”

“Then why bother telling me?”

“Cus it feels good to.” Atsumu chuckles low in his throat. “Or maybe it feels bad not to.”

Kiyoomi’s nails curl around a chunk of hair at the arch of his left brow. Then he tugs.

  
  
  
  


Miya Atsumu is not the first person to ask Kiyoomi out, but he is the first person to ask him out in a communal restroom, and that probably counts for something. 

Kiyoomi is filling in his brows. (Last night, he dug hard enough that dots of blood welled up from his flesh like murky water surfacing from a drain.) Penciling in the color is something he’s learned by rote repetition. A stroke here, a stroke there. His pencil has slowly but surely run out, though, and precision is much harder to obtain than it was four months ago. 

One sink over, Atsumu stands with a hip knocked against the chipped marble and a bamboo toothbrush pulling down his bottom lip. “Yer eyebrow pencil’s dull,” he mumbles. There’s foam dripping from the corner of his mouth. 

A stroke here, a stroke there. Kiyoomi can feel the blunt edge of his pencil against his skin. “Your observational skills amaze me,” he deadpans. 

“Ya wanna go shoppin’ for a new one?"

A stroke here, a stroke there. 

Kiyoomi turns toward Atsumu, who is still standing a sink over, hip knocked against the chipped marble and a bamboo toothbrush pulling down his bottom lip. “Are you asking me out?”

Atsumu spits into the sink, then turns the faucet handle on. Murky water surfaces from the drain. “There somethin’ wrong with that?” He’s keeping his voice level, locking his misgivings within his mouth. 

Is there something wrong with that?

“No, not really,” Kiyoomi responds, turning back to his makeup. “I buy my pencils online, though.” His cheeks are flushing. It’s February. 

“Dinner then, maybe?” Hope is spilling down the front of Atsumu’s sweatshirt. 

“Maybe.”

The noncommittal dinner becomes a reality two weeks later. Kiyoomi expects to be forced into a dimly lit restaurant with stiff cushions and aging wood. He ends up in Miya Atsumu’s apartment instead, eating homemade curry at the kitchen counter.

“Samu taught me a thing or two about cookin’,” Atsumu explains as he spoons the leftover soup into a glass container.

They watch a movie afterward. It’s some notably poignant film—because Atsumu loves a good drama—but Kiyoomi stops pretending to watch about an hour in. There’s an itch that’s demanding his attention now. He snakes a hand up to his brow and begins fiddling. 

“Yer lucky those are thick enough ya aren’t completely browless yet.” Atsumu is crossing his arms, expression inscrutable.

Kiyoomi nails pinch to a halt in the fine hairs. Does it make sense for him to feel like he’s being caught? 

In front of them, a heart-wrenching monologue drones on the TV. 

Atsumu reaches his hand up to gently pry apart the junction of Kiyoomi’s rigid pointer finger and thumb. “There ya go.”

They’re frozen for a moment, orbiting each other in their own little universe. 

Slowly, Atsumu bends Kiyoomi’s wrist back, farther and farther and farther, until it resembles an overzealous L. Then he presses a soft kiss to it.

Kiyoomi sucks in a breath, and all at once, the only thoughts buzzing in his brain are about Atsumu—infuriating, hopeless Atsumu. There is no desire to pick, no itching at his brow bone, no charring electricity beneath his skin. There is just the enigma in front of him, made of light and wonder and all the like. 

This moment of stupefaction lasts for seconds and minutes and hours. It’s Kiyoomi’s first kiss, and it isn’t even a real kiss. Atsumu is grinning deliriously. 

Kiyoomi’s face feels light. He slumps forward and ungainly knocks his head into the column of Atsumu’s neck. “You know,” he mumbles, “it isn’t going to go away every time the way it did now. It’s not that simple.” 

Hair grows back. Habits die hard. Bad things don’t just disappear when you fall in love.

“I know.” Atsumu’s lips trail up Kiyoomi’s hand and flutter against his palm. “I just wanted to let ya know that I’m here for ya if ya need me.” There's a feather-light brush against his knuckles, and then soft, tired eyes are resting upon his own. “I got you, baby.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Me? Writing something under 20k? It's more likely than you think.
> 
> But in all honesty, I started writing this at one am in a shitty hotel room and finished it on a two-hour flight. I’m not great at short fics, but the idea for this one has been dwelling in my head for the past few months, and I finally decided to exorcise it. Please feel free to point out any spelling or grammatical errors, as I expect there may be a few. 
> 
> Thank you so much for taking the time to read this silly, self-indulgent piece. And if you're from my twitter: sorry, there isn't much actual wrist kissing LOL.
> 
> That’s all. Later :)


End file.
